Feature
Back to our roots
Growing your own food—wherever you live—can yield real health benefits. Tara Garnett reports on a new growth movement
Inner city Birmingham is not the most strikingly obvious place to look for examples of horticultural abundance. Yet, tucked behind a row of Victorian houses, six gardens - totalling less than an acre - are home to an array of tomatoes, pumpkins, aubergines, coriander, fenugreek, mooli, karella, callaloo - as well as several goats, ducks, turkeys, chickens and bees.
Set up in 1981, Ashram Acres serves as a focus for the diverse multicultural local community, a place where people can farm organically, learn new skills and share their knowledge with others, enjoy the benefits of cheap fresh fruit and vegetables, learn new ways of cooking, and make new friends. It is also a place where the many Asian and Afro-Caribbean people in the area can grow some of the foods which form a major part of their diet and which are often prohibitively expensive to buy in Britain. The gardens are very much part of the locality: nearby schools often visit (the daily milking ceremony being wildly popular), people drop in to buy fresh cheese, yoghurt and honey, and celebrations and open days are held.
Ashram Acres is just one of an increasing number of food-growing projects, some well established, others just starting. As the voluntary sector has recognised for some time, urban food growing offers people, communities and the environment, multiple benefits. For a start, gardening is good exercise. Too often, physical activity seems to require luxury leisure centres, capital intensive techno-gizmos and the right (inevitably expensive) gear. The current norm - paying a subscription, working out at the gym and then driving to the supermarket - seems to be an elaborate way of killing one bird with a great many stones. Why run around a gym like a rodent on a wheel if your exertions can actually deliver your dinner - if the calories you expend actually produce the calories you consequently eat?
“Why run around a gym like a rodent on a wheel if your exertions can actually deliver your dinner?”
Another, obvious, advantage for food growers is access to fresh fruit and vegetables - of particular importance to low income groups who cannot afford them or who live on estates with poor transport and shopping facilities. Food growing can be one way of dealing with the situation, particularly for groups who can bulk buy seeds and share equipment when combined with, say, a food co-op in the area.
The health benefits of gardening are not purely physical. Horticulture has for some time now been used as a form of therapy for those with physical or learning disabilities, or mental health problems thanks to the work of organisations such as Horticultural Therapy. Many gardeners comment that gardening helps them to relieve stress and ‘put things in perspective’. The friendships formed down on the allotment, or within a gardening group, the pleasure of sharing seeds, produce and ideas are also highly valued.
There are also environmental benefits. Organic gardening improves the soil, helps trap rain water, promotes a diversity of wildlife, softens the harshness of the built environment and can be a far more useful method of environmental education than the usual doom and gloom global-warming type abstractions frequently on offer in schools. A home-grown meal on a plate is direct, edible evidence of our dependence on the environment. What is more, local food production helps counter the prevailing system of transporting, by air or road, large quantities of fruit and vegetables over long distances at enormous environmental expense. Growing even a symbolic amount of food can help raise awareness of these issues and encourage a shift towards buying seasonal, local produce.
Physical exercise, improved diet, psychological benefits, social and community interactions, economic benefits, environmental gains: the strength of food-growing projects lies in the linkages and positive interactions between these issues. There is now official recognition that social, environmental and economic issues cannot be dealt with separately; Agenda 21, a major outcome of the UN Earth Summit held at Rio in 1992, gives international sanction to the principle of sustainable development. So, too, does recent work undertaken by the European Commission on Sustainable Cities; and even the UK government’s recent Environmental Health Action Plan green paper pays lip service to the idea that environmental health ‘must be related to, and integrated with, plans to meet other needs of the community: e.g. employment and leisure, economy and development’ - although the contents of the plan would appear to ignore this somewhat.
“Food growing has honourably radical roots. As far back as 1649, Gerard Winstanley and the Diggers were claiming the right to dig”
There is growing awareness that change is not always best tackled from above. Some of the most useful and productive changes in society are initiated at community level. Urban food growing may seem a very humble way of achieving sustainable development, but when combined with other movements for social change - cycling, alternative energy, organic food, co-operatives, ethical investment, LETS (see box) - the impact can be enormous. Which is not to say that government and other institutions have no role to play. On the contrary, local government and health authorities can help provide much-needed funds, information and, of course, land. Some authorities are already working to support food growing as part of a ‘healthy city’, or ‘local agenda 21’ programme. In Bradford, for instance, a partnership between the council and the local environmental trust has led to the creation of a 7.5 acre community garden, comprising organic allotments, an aquaculture system, workshops, training facilities, a kitchen and play areas.
In Sheffield, the health promotion unit works with representatives from the local authority, a range of community gardening groups and environmental organisations to promote the uptake of allotments in the area and to support gardeners with training and advice. They are also planning to produce a directory identifying Sheffield-based sources of skills, tools, information, and gardening courses. A local college provides free training in organic gardening to interested groups and individuals and has made a secure, fenced site available. There are also plans to convert derelict land adjoining a steelworks into community workshops and a market garden. Both workshops and poly tunnels will be heated using waste heat from the steelworks and will provide a source of food and employment for the mainly Asian population living in this deprived area of Sheffield.
Food growing has a significant contribution to make to our well-being. But it is important to emphasise that it is not, and should not be, a substitute for the welfare state. Gardening is not, as John Stuart Mill - a strong critic of the 19th century allotments movement - feared, a means of ‘getting the poor to grow their own poor rate’, although there is always the danger that it may be advocated as such. On the contrary, food growing has honourably radical roots. As far back as 1649, Gerard Winstanley and the Diggers were claiming the right to dig; the right for ordinary people to control the means and fruits of production. Growing food is a way, however small, of saying ‘no’ to the excesses of the international market economy. It is also a way of reclaiming control of our leisure, that is, of our unpaid activities. We are unlikely, for the foreseeable future, to get back to full employment; ‘leisure’ is becoming a way of life. To continue to define and value people in terms of their role in the market place is to exclude large sections of the population. Nevertheless, leisure as passive, money-dependent consumption is neither sustainable nor a means by which people can gain self-respect. Food growing, on the other hand, is active, creative, productive. In its quiet, dogged, muddy kind of way it offers revolution; a real alternative to our decaying notions of health, wealth and happiness.
National Food Alliance, 5-11 Worship Street, London EC2A 2BH. Tel: 0171-628 2442.
Tara Garnett is project officer for the National Food Alliance and the SAFE AllianceGrowing cities
City-based agriculture is common in other parts of the world. According to the US based Urban Agriculture Network, 90 per cent of China’s vegetables and pork are raised in urban regions - which contributes about 40 - 50 per cent of people’s calorific intake. In many Latin American countries, a third of families fruit and vegetable needs are met by urban production while the figures are even higher for Singapore, Kampala, and Karachi. For the urban poor, who spend on average between 50-80 per cent of their income on food, urban food growing is essential.
Food growing is not only to be found in the developing world. In the US, 30 per cent of urban families grow some food.
In Britain, concerted action by the government can do a great deal to encourage food growing. As a result of the Second World War Dig for Victory campaign, a tenth of Britain’s food needs (about half its fruit and vegetable requirements) were met from the cultivation of back gardens, allotments, parks and school grounds. Our national diet was healthier then than it is now.
The fruits of inner-city labours
Restore, a project in Oxford, has been offering horticultural work experience to people with mental health problems for 18 years now. Participants sell fruit and vegetables, home-made jams and pickles to the local community as well as cooking and eating the produce themselves in a communal kitchen.
In 1984, staff, students and parents at the Victoria School for physically and mental disabled children in Poole, planned and made a garden in the school grounds. The project was so successful that a horticultural centre has recently been set up to provide further training to young adults with disabilities. This year, the first nine students graduated from the course - all achieving grade one Horticulture NVQs. Such training provides a potential source of employment for those who want it, and has been a means for the students not only to enjoy themselves, but to take on responsibility, and to gain confidence and social skills.
The LETS movement (Local Exchange Trading Schemes) is also very keen on the idea of incorporating food growing into its exchange activities. LETS is a credit-debit system of community barter, whereby members can exchange goods and services; the benefits, particularly for unemployed people and those on low incomes, are well documented. LETS groups throughout the UK - in Brixton, Plymouth and Frome - are beginning to rent allotments from the local council and sell their (usually organic) produce on LETS.
