Abstract
Darrin Nordahl first published Public Produce: The New Urban Agriculture in 2009 motivated by the increasing food insecurity observed in many cities throughout the country resulting from the Great Recession. Nordahl champions public produce, that is, using public land for growing food-producing plants instead of ornamental ones, as a means to reduce food insecurity. In his vision, parkland, street medians, tree lawns, easements, planters, vacant land, and similar spaces would be planted to produce food accessible to anyone. This differentiates public produce from traditional community gardens, which, even if on public lands, usually benefit a limited number of people: those who tend to it and others with whom they decide to share.
Public produce projects were just taking off in 2009; since then, many lessons have been learned and more projects have been implemented. This motivated Nordahl to document and include examples of public produce in the second edition of the book. Thus, he traveled to many American and Canadian cities to observe these projects, interview the people responsible for starting and maintaining them, and observe how people used public produce. He was able to assess what makes these initiatives successful and how many attempts and iterations it took to implement them. Nordahl also documented projects that were not as successful and why they failed. Another significant difference between the two editions is that in the first edition he advocated for food access by the destitute and chronically hungry, while in the second edition he argues that everyone benefits from public produce. For example, some people might be able to afford sufficient food on a regular basis, but they might not be able to afford enough fresh produce, or they might just not have access to places where they can buy it. Even people for whom affordability is not a problem might only have access to a limited assortment of fresh produce.
Chapter 1 (“Food Security”) opens with a discussion of the current food production system, its dependency on fossil fuels, and how climate change can affect food production in an already unsustainable agricultural system. Nordahl discusses how conventional agriculture promotes crop specialization in select regions, the specialized distribution system it requires, and how these systems may be affected by foodborne pathogens and bioterrorism. He also discusses common challenges with food production in urban soils, such as contamination with heavy metals in residential areas and brownfields.
In chapter 2 (“The Cost of Healthy Calories”), Nordahl defines and discusses food deserts, their repercussion on people’s health, and the economic reasons that might lead people to make less healthy food choices. Food deserts are “places with too few choices of healthy and affordable food, and that are oversaturated with unhealthy food outlets such as fast food joints” (45). He discusses why food deserts become host to a disproportionately higher number of fast food joints and what some cities have done in an attempt to ameliorate this problem. He argues that any effort to increase accessibility must also ensure affordability in order for people to make healthier decisions.
In chapter 3 (“Public Space, Public Officials, Public Policy”), Nordahl provides various examples of how public officials have reimagined the use of public spaces and made policy changes that promote food security, for example, the planters in front of city hall in Provo, UT; the urban agriculture executive directive in San Francisco, CA; transitional gardens in Worthington, OH; and others. This chapter is particularly useful owing to interviews with the originators of the projects, the documented learned lessons on the barriers to implementation these originators encountered, how they overcame these barriers, and what worked or what needed improvement.
Chapter 4 (“To Glean and Forage in the City”) discusses how public produce can give people an opportunity for gleaning and foraging. Gleaning is the practice of collecting produce from the fields after the commercial harvest, although Nordahl refers to gleaning in the context of harvesting public produce for donation or a commercial purpose. He uses foraging in the context of harvesting for our own consumption. The author argues that some people like to forage and glean, for example at U-Pick farms, because these activities connect them to their food and give them a sense of obtaining their own sustenance. Public produce can provide this opportunity. In addition, gleaning produce from public and private spaces presents opportunities to increase food security and to create jobs and revenues. For example, City Fruit, a gleaning organization in Seattle, WA, allows homeowners to register their backyard trees, and then collects excess fruit. A majority of the fruits collected are given to food banks and the rest is sold to local restaurants, allowing a profit that sustains the organization. In addition, City Fruit provides the upkeep of fruit trees at city parks for free, which saves the city money. With this example, Nordahl illustrates that collaborative arrangements can take care of some of the maintenance burden for public agencies and private homeowners.
In chapter 5 (“Maintenance and Aesthetics”), Nordahl addresses the common objections that city governments have toward public produce regarding maintenance and aesthetics. He aims to dispel the common objection that edible fruit trees and other produce can be messy plants. Although it is true that fallen fruits may be unsightly and attract bugs while rotting on sidewalks or the ground, Nordahl alerts us to the fact that many ornamental plants are equally messy, if not messier. He argues that collecting edible fruits is not more time consuming than cleaning up nonedible fruits and pods from the grounds, which is already a common task for city crews. He exhorts the reader to not dismiss food plants in public landscapes because of perceptions that they are ugly or labor intensive. Rather, plants provide benefits other than aesthetics and a city concerned with food security should change its mindset about what are appropriate landscape plants. It is possible to have food-bearing plants without increasing the burden on maintenance staff. In some cases, food-bearing plants can be lucrative. For example, the University of California–Davis solved the problem of litter from olive trees by collecting the olives and making artisanal oil and other products, thus offsetting the cost of harvesting them. Nordahl advises that not all solutions need to be entrepreneurial or innovative. Sometimes a simple sign letting people know that they are welcome to pick the produce is enough to reduce or eliminate the problem of littering.
The last chapter (“Food Literacy”) is dedicated to the discussion of how public produce provides a great opportunity to increase food literacy. A growing number of Americans have not seen fruits and vegetables growing in the field and may not even be able to identify when they are ready for harvesting. Public produce provides an opportunity for people to see how fruits and vegetables grow, learn when to harvest, and taste them when they are ripe. Nordahl argues that much of the industrial agriculture is dedicated to traditional staples, which are mainly based on the preferences of the past or current non-Hispanic white population. However, the United States has become an increasingly culturally diverse country over the past few decades. Thus, many people have become more interested in diverse foods. Public produce provides an opportunity to be exposed to new foods and provide culturally relevant food literacy. Nordahl believes that having a larger food vocabulary is essential for food security.
A strength of this book is that it effectively connects many of the issues related to food security and health, thus providing readers newly interested in the topic with a broad and well-grounded foundation. Also, Nordahl effectively illustrates the role of public produce in the improvement of food security and makes it difficult to disagree with his assessment that the impact can be positively significant. He aims to change the minds of many readers on how they view urban agriculture and urban plants, and I believe he succeeds. The descriptions of public produce projects in chapter 3 are well developed and he answers the questions that public officials and those doing the implementation groundwork are more likely to ask. This chapter should be of special interest to planners and public officials preparing to implement public produce concepts.
Although this book has many strengths, it also has some weaknesses. While there is abundant scholarly work on some of the topics discussed in the book, Nordahl does not reference these works. Nevertheless, the book is successful because it presents these topics in an accessible manner to nonacademic readers. In addition, the discussion on food security (chapter 2) actually revolves around food safety in the food system. This might be confusing for some readers, as the conversation on food security in the United States, for the most part, centers around the issue of access to fresh and nutritious foods. I will side with Nordahl in advocating that the food security conversation in the United States must also include food safety issues. Lastly, the definition of food desert he adopted ignores some of the complexities of food deserts, such as the fact that they may not even have fast food joints or the role of physical barriers in the built environment. Nevertheless, this definition is useful for Nordahl’s purpose of demonstrating the potential of public produce to increase food security and improve health.
In sum, the strengths of this book outweigh the few weaknesses. This book will be very useful to public officials, planners, community activists, and residents interested in food security and urban agriculture. This book is a must read for city planners and city sustainability coordinators.