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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Check out southwest Detroit and Mexicantown, there are several grocery stores with great, inexpensive produce!
Bruce,
Ignoring all the other factors (and there are a lot of them, some of which the other posters have mentioned), what do you think about farming vertically?
I’ll have to go hunt down the article again, but someone had written about re-jiggering empty office buildings into essentially vertical farms. Clearly there wouldn’t be that many, but do you think that might make this idea more feasible?
NO produce carrying chains? A quick Google search shows Aldi stores with Detroit addresses. Aldi is a grocery chain. At least here in Chicago, Aldi carries produce.
That would seem to be the first factual error.
Second, as others note above, there’s not really enough arable land for self-sufficiency — even assuming Northerners wanted to go back to a steady diet of root vegetables in the winter. As for me, I had enough turnips to last a lifetime when I was a kid.
Third, the environment — in terms of agricultural skills AND in terms of the likelihood of theft at harvest time.
I enjoy my vegetable garden and recommend others do this, but let’s not go ridiculously overboard here.
There is plenty of food being provided in the city 6 days a week at Eastern Market loaded with fresh, local, and organic produce. Who needs a grocery when you have a giant farmer’s market? It’s all local:
http://www.easternmarket.org/
That’s right, 43 acres.
When you grind Detroit down decade after decade, what’s left but to patronize? Raccoon carcasses–how lurid!
Why expect cities to be agriculturally self-sufficient? That’s not important, particularly, and big corporation agricultural techniques probably pose a greater environmental risk to nearby dense populations than steel and automobile factories. That said, if Detroit wants to manage the urban prairie effect with greenspace that people may or may not garden in, I’m sure that’s as good an idea as any.
I didn’t know we survived on local raccoon and pheasant meat in Detroit… the things non-Detroiters can teach us Detroiters about our eating habits and methods of survival.