Community Food

Soil is a little pricier than seeds, and because it’s also much heavier, the CO2 emissions associated with transporting it from place to place are

Cooperative composting, by Conscious Design, via Unsplash.com

higher: the heavier something is, the more energy you need to move it (physicsclassroom.com). But we can make our own soil by combining certain kitchen waste and tree leaves. Add your compost to a community compost bin, and everyone has the soil they need to grow their own food without spending much or any extra money, and, at the same time, reduces the wasted food that would increase methane emissions! Here’s how (Institute for Local Self Reliance).

You’ve got your seeds, you’ve got your soil, it’s time to plant! You can create your own veggie garden, but there are additional benefits to co-creating a community garden with your neighbors. More and more communities, especially in cities and suburbs, are getting involved (USA Today)

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in community gardening to grow their own food. And it turns out that there are some health benefits (American Association of Retired People) to working in the dirt. Want to get started on planning a community garden with your neighbors? Look here (growveg.com).

Your lawn is all shade! What are you supposed to do? You could grow extra leafy veggies that don’t need so much sun and trade them for your neighbor’s root and fruit veggies. Some communities practice yard-sharing (Shared Earth). The idea is that instead of one household trying to grow everything it needs on its property, a community grows enough of everything for everyone, strengthening the bonds that make communities more resilient to future climate shocks.

An increasing number of towns and cities are changing their laws to allow residents to raise small livestock, like bees, chickens and goats, as a way of increasing food security (World Vision). Win 1 = food from animals. Win 2 = secondary benefit from each animal listed. Win 3 = local food means

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lower food miles. Win, win, win!

Keep in mind that keeping livestock closer to us comes with its own issues, like noise, smell, and even avian flu (Planning for Residential Communities, Cornell University).  Here’s a guide to get you started. Working as a community to address these issues would help ensure that neighbors understand livestock care and benefits and decrease the likelihood of complaints from neighbors who aren’t participating (yet).

This creative approach combines hydroponics — growing plants in water with no soil — with fish who eat some of the plants and then poop fertilizer. In some systems, there’s fertilizer left over for other uses, such as gardening, leading to more healthy soil, leading in turn to a well-fed, healthy community. And you get to eat the plants and the fish! It can feed a household, or scale up for a community. Explore here (learn.eartheasy.com).

Some communities make accessing fresh, perishable food easier for those most at risk by setting up outdoor refrigerators, mostly in urban settings, where anyone can come by and either drop off food or come and take food if needed. This way, people have access to food any time they need it. Free refrigerators also make accessing food safer for undocumented immigrants who may feel anxious about trying to get food from government food pantries where they may be asked for identification and thereby risk deportation. You can find a how-to for volunteering or setting up a new free fridge here (mashable.com), and you can get help finding one for your own needs here (freedge.org).

Your community may not be able to grow everything you need; you may need small, local farms to help fill in with the foods the rest of you can’t

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manage on your own. Many communities take part in Community-Supported Agriculture to support their local small farms and to get regular access to vegetables. Because the farms are local, the food miles are shorter and the veggies are fresher. And because the food isn’t being stored for such a long time nor transported as far, there’s also: not as much need for the energy necessary to keep refrigerated trucks and coolers cold, and less of a chance for some of it to be damaged and dumped (creating methane as it rots). By the way, many CSAs practice regenerative organic farming (Rodale Institute), which not only reduces emissions but can also lead to higher carbon sequestration in the soil. You can read more about CSAs here (simpleseasonal.com), and you can see if there are CSAs near where you live (U.S. Dept. of Agriculture).

As mentioned above, farmers are getting old. The way a lot of huge, industrial farms have been run, farming is a lonely, risky business (phys.org and nevegetable.org, respectively), but it doesn’t have to be. Your farm could be a co-op, or part of a larger co-op of nearby farms. According to the USDA, co-ops are:

…producer- and user-owned businesses that are controlled by and operate for the benefit of their members, rather than outside investors…..Farmer-owned co-ops help producer-members market and process their crops and livestock, and secure needed production supplies and services.

If your farm becomes a cooperative (shareable.net), you can consider tying it more closely to the community, let your children get experience working there, and let everyone take a turn. And then the farm itself can feed the community’s schools, restaurants, and cafeterias.

Another way of thinking about our relationship to farms is to increase the food we actually grow in our own communities. Agrihoods are sort of new, but the idea is spreading quickly. There are a variety of approaches, including community gardens, local farm stands, and even growing a community around a small farm. The point is to keep the community involved with growing its food. Here are 12 examples (https://www.shareable.net) to inspire you.

It is possible to develop an area in your community that will grow food every year with little to no maintenance. Specialized landscape planners can carefully consider everything from the ground cover to the trees to create a mutually supportive area of growth every year. An edible food forest takes a lot of work over the first year or two to get it going, and then — free food (tenthacrefarm.com)! Bonus: more carbon sequestration.

You can use cold frame sand build greenhouses to lengthen your growing season as individuals, of course, but many hands make light work: it’s easier to build greenhouses and walipinis (morningchores.com) as a community, and by sharing information about ideas (eartheasy.com) like multiple plantings per season and protecting veggies against the cold, you’ll wind up with a bigger harvest to share.

Harvest time! Don’t keep it to yourself, share your bounty with your neighbors — it’s actually good for you. That’s right, research has demonstrated that “the more often people eat with others, the more likely they are to feel happy and satisfied with their lives” (The University of Oxford). And, of course, those kinds of connections make communities more resistant to future climate shock. But wait, you’ve never had to organize a meal for that many people, will this just be chaos? No worries, we got you. Plan it like this.