In Britain, the most urbanised country in Europe, 200,000 households keep hens. A few weeks ago, when four young Royal College of Art graduates launched their Eglu — an urban henhouse complete with two laying hens designed to “make hen-keeping cool” — they had over 200 orders straight away. Poultrykeeping courses in Troston, Suffolk, run by Francine Raymond, are regularly sold out. And hens are the least of it: such is the demand for allotments that in some areas there are waiting lists of up to eight years.
Something is happening. As the global food market insinuates its way into every corner of our lives and we get fatter and fatter and diabetes and cancer rates grow, many of us want to reconnect to food in the real and raw. Not only do we want to eat what’s grown or reared locally, many of us want to do it ourselves — in pots on a terrace, on a flat roof or a sunny windowsill. Books such as James and Adam Caplin’s Urban Eden: Grow Really Delicious Fruit, Vegetables and Herbs in a Really Small Space (Kyle Cathie) find an enthusiastic readership.
Two years ago Sir Don Curry published his report for the Government on the future of farming and food in the UK — all its many recommendations lead to one conclusion: the need to reconnect the food chain to its customers. One very effective way to do that is to produce more food in our towns and cities.
Raj Datta runs a mushroom farm, Agridutt, right under a flyover on London’s North Circular road, one of the busiest roads in Britain. He produces about eight tonnes of button mushrooms a week, using a system of very low chemical input. His air-conditioned, temperature-controlled and insulated polytunnels provide a perfect growing environment. The land he occupies was once derelict — now it provides jobs for more than 30 people from Newham, one of Britain’s poorest boroughs.
The button mushrooms have a ready market in the corner shops, ethnic restaurants and cafés of North London. But he’s too small for supermarkets and anyway they rely mostly on cheap imports from Eastern Europe. He’s tried to supply schools and hospitals in his area without success; they all find it easier, he says, to pick up a telephone to order ready-prepared food from the big processing companies. When you taste one of Raj’s mushrooms, crisp and fresh, you know what a shame that is.
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The three-acre Salop Drive Market Garden in Sandwell, near Oldbury in the Black Country, had its beginnings five years ago with the vision of the local director of public health, Dr John Middleton. Working in one of the country’s most economically depressed boroughs, he saw the health effects of diets lacking fresh fruit and vegetables. He thought one solution was to produce more food in the immediate locality. Now, what was once a muddy, almost totally derelict site is a thriving and professionally run horticultural enterprise — complete with six commercial-sized poly-tunnels — supplying local people with weekly boxes of fruit and veg. This week in your £4 box you’d get broad and French beans, lettuce, cabbage, carrots, a cucumber, spring onions and courgettes — bulked out with potatoes and onions bought in from a local supplier. Two workers in the food project have built up the business with the involvement of local residents, and now hundreds of volunteers — young, old, disabled, formerly housebound — work in the garden, attend cooking classes and, in some cases, grow their own food on the mini-allotments on site.
There are many examples all over the country of people getting together to grow food in more than a thousand city farms and community gardens. In the Restore project in Oxford, people with mental-health problems grow food on a public allotment, supplying the local community with vegetable boxes. In the West Country, Somerset Food Links has been working with primary schools encouraging school gardens, making links to children’s diets and bringing sausagemakers and cheesemakers into schools. The UN Food and Agricultural Organisation puts the productivity of urban agriculture at 15 times that of rural food production.
The Government is keen on new agriculture models and desperate for a public health strategy that will save the NHS from bankruptcy. The answer might lie in the urban jungle.
Sheila Dillon presents Radio 4’s The Food Programme