Category Archives: Food

Is facilitating citizen initiatives a food strategy?

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One can be quite busy at the moment just going to interesting food strategy events. After all, it is harvesting time. Hence, we have the Week of Taste with activities all over the country and the Capital of Taste which is Groningen this year and the Food4You festival in Wageningen and.. probably many more events that I am not aware of. The Capital of Taste activities are situated inside the City of Groningen but in the meanwhile the city is also involved in the making of a Regional Food Strategy. Not so easy (see also Foodlog blog). What is the region? The province with its capital city? Or the administrative region Groningen-Assen which cuts across two provinces? (and who has money? Labeled for what?)

Moreover, what is the problem? Again, difficult. Maybe broadly covered under the heading of ‘urban-rural relationships’ but in fact more narrowly focused on how to get the urban citizen to buy regional products (with no specific focus on sustainable agriculture). Is this a problem? Not really, it is a chance it was agreed in the meeting. A chance which could be facilitated by the government without standing in the way. So there you have your strategy and it resonates with Hinrichs (2000) defensive localism.

It also resonates in another way with Proeftuin Amsterdam, where also the key focus was to facilitate initiatives already there. The task; bringing together, connecting, inspiring, communicating across the energy which crystallizes in a particular topic, food is the hottest at the moment. “We should ask ourselves, where is the energy is flowing towards” I heard in the meeting. Hence, the most important driving force of Proeftuin was according to a presentation, the attention for citizen initiatives. A conclusion too in the Schuttelaar debate in Wageningen, same day. Research done by students of Wageningen university confirms the trend; municipalities busy with food policy/strategy/projects were those activated by their own active citizens. 

After this, the next question often asked, becomes a bit weird. How to anchor the food strategy for the long-term? There is nothing to anchor where the ‘policy’ is to facilitate citizen initiatives, this goes as long as citizens are active. Proeftuin Amsterdam does not exist anymore. Amongst others because there was no political problem (“er lag geen bestuurlijke vraag”). Food security, policies for social exclusion and poverty and access to good food, problems the Food Banks now address, were deliberately not part of the Proeftuin focus.

So what’s wrong with stimulating enthusiastic citizens busy with creating sustainable food systems in various ways? Nothing of course. However, if that’s all, it seems that despite the many ‘nice’ activities, food keeps being seen as a private responsibility. There is a serious problem in the articulation of public interest addressing structural problems in our food system and in fact, no attention at all for social justice. Do-it-yourself for those who can.

Die Produktive Stadt / Carrot City – Designing for Urban Agriculture

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Carrot City is a traveling exhibit that shows how the design of buildings and cities can enable the production of food in the city. It explores the relationships between design and urban food systems as well as the impact that agricultural issues have on the design of urban spaces and buildings. The focus is on how the increasing interest in growing food within the city, supplying food locally, and food security in general, is changing urban design and built form. Carrot City showcases projects in Toronto and other Canadian and American cities, as well as relevant international examples from around the world. The exhibition contains a mix of projects that were recently completed or are currently under way, and visionary, speculative design proposals by both professional designers and students, which illustrate the potential for design that responds to food issues. The exhibit explores these issues at different scales, the city scale, the community scale, housing, rooftops and the products that make all of this possible.

Main curators of Carrot City are Mark Gorgolewski, June Komisar and Joe Nasr of Ryerson University Toronto (Canada). It has traveled to New York City, Montreal and Casablanca. Carroty City is now coming to Europe with exhibitions at the Technical University in Berlin (30 September – 30 October 2011) and the Technical University in Munich (8 – 26 November 2011). For more information about the exhibits and opening ceremonies have a look at the flyer.

Harvesting the fruits of labour

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Exactly two years after a film eveningorganised by Transition Town Vallei united some people of the neighborhood, the ‘forest garden’ in the Pomona neighborhood in Wageningen was officially opened by municipality Alderman Lex Hoefsloot on the 3rd of September. The implementation of the design made by the neighborhood (see previous blogs) was finished just in time. After planting many different fruit trees and bushes in March and April, numerous watering sessions during the dry spring and some rainy working days in May and June, we used the summer to build a few wooden structures such as a pergola, a tree- trunk bench and an information panel. Also…..the weeds kept appearing and we sowed grass which is regularly cut by one of the residents. Additional plants were planted too, offered by a resident who maintains them. In the week before opening, the community centre went into the garden with children to harvest the first apples. Not from the newly planted trees but from those trees we rescued from under the brambles. The apples were used by children in the weekly cooking class run by the centre to make apple pie. This was precisely how we envisaged the function and use of this ‘garden’ when we started writing the plan two years ago. I love it when a plan comes together. (pictures below; making fruit juice on the spot and garden excursion)

Surinam bami, Georgian beet-salad and Turkish baklava

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The allotment gardeners of De Koekelt have gathered for a potluck in De Koekelt on Saturday, third of September. Surinam, Turkish, Italian, Georgian, and Dutch gardeners prepared food with the vegetables of their garden which, all together, made a very tasty and varied lunch.
I am doing my thesis on De Koekelt, trying to find out how to strengthen sense of community and participation of the gardeners. De Koekelt is an allotment garden in Ede with gardeners of twelve different nationalities. By walking around one can recognize great differences between the gardens. Some grow more flowers, others more vegetables, some gardeners build a place to sit down and enjoy, while others use their space in the most efficient way to produce as much food as possible.
These differences are appreciated by the gardeners, but create friction as well: “Why do foreigners need to grow so many beans?” or “Why do Dutch women only grow flowers and weeds on their garden?”
With help from three gardeners, I organized the potluck, where the gardeners had a chance to appreciate the differences between themselves, by tasting the different meals each gardener proudly prepared from their own garden products. By eating together, they used the opportunity to speak with gardeners they usually never spoke with. For example, a Georgian woman and a Turkish man discovered that they used to be neighbours, since the villages they come from are both situated on the border of Georgia and Turkey.
The board of De Koekelt, who was sceptical about this activity (“do you really think the gardeners will do all this effort of cooking and bringing their own plates?”) was also present and enjoyed the gathering. They had experienced a sense of losing control, but they seemed to realize that gardeners initiative should be stimulated, not constrained. They saw how little organization is needed to bring the gardeners together, and although they initially objected against this activity, they concluded that this should be organized more often

Lise Alix, MSc-student Rural Sociology

Conference call – Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society (new deadlines)

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In June I published a post about the upcoming conference ‘Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society: International Conference on Multifunctional Agriculture and Urban-Rural Relations’, which included a call for Working Group proposals. The deadline for submitting Working Group proposals was 1 September 2011. This post is to announce that the deadline for submitting Working Group proposals has been postponed to 15 september 2011. If you would like to convene a working group but don’t have time to write a proposal, you can also express your interest by sending me an e-mail (han.wiskerke@wur.nl). Have a look at the conference website for an overview of the working group themes that have been proposed by the scientific committee. The deadline for abstracts will also be postponed by 2 weeks to 15 December 2011.