Community Gardens: Good Food For All

"Perhaps the greatest benefit of urban agriculture is the provision of affordable food supplies for lower-income people."
           -Toward Sustainable Communities (Roseland 52)

 How much does it cost to eat a healthy diet?

To put things in perspective...

A McDouble from McDonald's Dollar Menu will cost you just $1+ tax, and provides you with 390 calories, 22g protein, 19 g fat (of which 10g is saturated fat), and 920 mg sodium.

How can we expect people who have limited incomes to pass up what seems like such a great deal (price-wise) on food? Time and again, studies show that when money is tight, cutting food costs is one of the first things that Americans do (see the NY Times article on this topic, "When Money is Tight, and Junk Food Beckons" ).

Community gardens are proving to be a viable source and alternative to cheap junk food, especially for those on a limited budget. Take for example Mother Hubbard's Cupboard in Bloomington, IN, a NGO that puts a twist on your normal food pantry set up by providing low-income clients with as much local, organic produce and wholesome foods as possible, much of which is grown in the community gardens that have been established around the city.

Community gardens not only provide access to good, healthy food for all who participate, but also serve as educational tools to teach people about the basics of gardening and nutrition. They connect people to the food they're eating, helping people to take a step back from an industrialized food system in which most of our food travels 1,300 food miles from the source of it's production before it ever reaches our plate (Roseland 51).

If community gardens can help provide high quality, healthy food for the poor AND reduce people's global environmental footprint, what are we waiting for? Let's get gardening!

Personal Project: Greening the Restaurant Business-A Case Study

Walking down Fourth Street in Bloomington, Indiana is usually a pleasant experience- delicious aromas waft towards you from every direction as your gaze falls upon the quaint ethnic restaurants that line the street on either side of the road. However, this wonderful street is hiding a dirty little secret- NONE of these restaurants (to my knowledge) recycles, let alone composts, any of its waste!

While I have little control over how each restaurant operates, I have worked as a waitress at Anyetsang's Little Tibet for over a year and a half and am going to make it my personal project to design a recycling program that works for them.

Constraints that I will need to consider when developing this program include the following:


     1) Space is (VERY) limited, both inside the kitchen and out back by the dumpsters
     2) Recycling has to make the flow of the kitchen EASIER, not harder, for everyone involved
     3) Storage of recycling outside cannot interfere with the parking area or dumpsters
     4) The recyclables need to get from the restaurant to the recycling center on a regular basis
     5) Little (or most likely, NO) money will be available to fund any changes to the current system

Thankfully, the owners are all interested in the idea of recycling and are in agreement that recycling should become a practice at the restaurant- now it's just a matter of figuring out how to actually make it happen!

Reducing Consumption in a Consumerist Society

"If everyone lived like today's North Americans, it would take at least two additional planet Earths to produce the resources, absorb the wastes, and otherwise maintain life-support... North American footprints are double European footprints, and seven times that of the average Asian or African footprint."
               -Toward Sustainable Communities, Mark Roseland

Consumerism is a driving force in today's society that is a major contributor to the reasons for which our current system of living is unequivocally not sustainable. The ideas that wealth and success are in large part measured or evaluated to some degree on the quantity of belongings that we posses is a staggeringly different approach to living than we should be embodying if we hope to achieve a system of living that can be deemed "sustainable."

Our current culture is so entrenched in the consumerist model that changing the system will be difficult, but ultimately a major shift in lifestyle is necessary for the health of the planet. The benefits of consuming fewer goods are undeniable- less consumption will require the use of  fewer natural resources, especially fossil fuels, which will in turn translate into less pollution of the environment. Reducing consumption will also result in less "trash" generation, and hopefully would result in more wide spread recycling and reuse practices.

Reducing consumption also applies to land use practices, and in particular, the urban sprawl that has been the model of development around most cities in the world. Urban sprawl is to some extent an extension of the consumerist mentality in that each household wants a piece of land for its own, entirely separate and under its individual control. This approach to land use is not sustainable, and perpetuates the desires of individuals to consume more in order to outfit their lives in the suburbs, which in themselves are neither rural nor urban, and as such are distally located from both the raw resources and the final creations of goods that drive their consumption habits.

In short, a dramatic shift in lifestyle choices is necessary for the health of the planet; reducing consumption is just one way to enact such change.