But where we differ from others operating in London is that we are trying to show that growing here can also be economically viable.”Brown’s quest to find an alternative to supermarket domination of the food chain began in the mid-Nineties. A one-time local campaigns organiser for Friends of the Earth, she and two friends had initiated one of London’s first vegetable box schemes. But logistical difficulties in bringing in food from farms near the capital led her to investigate the concept of providing a proportion of the produce from local food plots.The growing part of the project now employs one full-time grower, a part-time grower and a team of 25 volunteer helpers Working on such small plots restricts what can be grown. “You’d need a huge area just to grow a two weeks’ supply of potatoes,” says Brown. “We’re working with hand-tools on sites where you can’t get large machinery in.
We grow a diversity of crops that have reintroduced a sense of seasonality into the food we supply.”She says putting the emphasis on growing salads makes sense economically. “Salad leaves are highly perishable, so it’s sensible to grow them as close to where they will be eaten as possible. But they’re also high-value products, so our salad bags increase our chances of making it work financially.”The long-term aim is to meet the salad requirements of the box scheme from the plots, while the rest of the produce is sourced as locally as possible This can includeproduce from Continental Europe. Some of the farmers who supply the box scheme also sell at Growing Communities’ all-organic weekly farmers’ market.
Brown describes this trinity of growing plots, box scheme and market as an attempt to create a business-sized unit that works and could be replicated elsewhere.”What we have is a system that supplies some food from small pieces of land in the city, links out to small farmers just outside London, extends further afield to cooperatives in Norfolk, and finally brings in produce from Europe at certain times of the year. If you bring all these together with, perhaps, the occasional luxury product such as bananas from a fair-trade source, you have a potential model for the whole food system.”Brown’s idea deserves serious consideration, given that London’s voracious food demands draw upon a land area 120 times its size to satisfy it, according to the Soil Association. Yet this localised food network, with the city making much use of urban fringe market gardens and farms, was common practice until well into the last century.For Jeremy Iles, director of the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens, the loss of such local networks is part of a general dislocation of town dwellers from the food growing process. “Even until relatively recently, the average family garden had a vegetable plot,” he says. “But the austerity of rationing with which a past generation grew up was replaced by consumer confidence in supermarket culture from the Sixties. It displaced the knowledge and commitment to grow our own food.”Elsewhere in the world, growing in cities, particularly in developing countries with less sophisticated food supply chains, remains important Berlin has 80,000 community gardeners on municipal land. And, after Cuba’s intensive agricultural system crashed along with the fall of the Soviet Union, thousands of volunteer urban growers in Havana started to raise crops everywhere from plots to balconies and rooftops, transforming food production.
