Detroit is practically a giant food desert, with no produce-carrying grocery chains left and its citizens resorting to local raccoon and pheasant meat. According to Mark Dowie in Guernica, that makes Detroit a prime candidate for the world’s first “100 percent food-self-sufficient city.” (HT: Joel Whitney) [%comments]
Detroit Produce City?
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Good that I’m not the only one who looks at swaths of vacant urban land and thinks of agriculture.
This scenario is an opportunity to highlight Detroit’s farmers markets. Places like the Eastern Market can fill the void in lieu of macro-farming operations.
Self-sufficiency never looked so good!
Back-of-the-envelope calculation: if every square inch of Detroit’s surface area of ~140 square miles were devoted to agriculture (this leaves no room for housing, roads, or anything else), and assuming it’s all fertile soil, it might *just* be possible to feed its 900,000 people. The figures work out to 4,243 square feet per person, and some people claim that it’s possible to grow enough food to live on in about 4,000 square feet. In other words, no way can it, or any other city, be anywhere near self-sufficient. Of course we don’t expect agricultural communities to be self-sufficient either: they don’t produce their own tractors, trucks, fuel, housing material, etc.
When the winter comes, do they need Indians to bring them food so they can survive?
There was a local grocery chain that made an effort to be in the city. Then they got sucked into the A&P chain. So much for local, responsible, corporate citizenry.
And now they are completely out of business. That worked out well, didn’t it?
Wouldn’t there be a problem with soil contamination, after decades of being beneath or within an industrial city? A backyard garden is one thing, but wouldn’t farms be using soil from locations that had been in close proximity to factories, gas stations, old garbage dumps, garages, etc? It seems like hardly a month goes by I don’t hear a local story about a playground being contaminated or something, and my area isn’t very industrial compared to what I’ve always heard about Detroit.
I didn’t read far enough into the article, I see he does address contaminants, but I wonder if he isn’t being a little optimistic about how easy they are to clean up.