First Urban ‘Agrihood’ in America Feeds 2,000 Households for Free
intelligentnow.org
intelligentnow.org
This sounds vaguely profound, until you realize that other species are also predated on, starve to death, and die from trivially preventable issues.
Sounds profound until you realize we are too.
And while there are more people that starve to death that should, and more people who cannot get affordable health care, I would still much rather live in the modern world than head out into the forest and try to survive by myself, or as a subsistence farmer on a manor lord's land.
What animal would you trade places with? For that matter, would you be willing to roll the dice and change places with a random "free" human being living 5,000 years ago?
I don't disagree that this is probably the best time to be alive on average, but the standard deviation is pretty enormous, and I would argue that it might not be the best time to be alive in all places.
Still statistically better than a random human being in 3,000 BC.
And of course, we don't live in the best possible universe; but on average, a random human's odds of being eaten by a figurative grue monotonically increase as you go backwards in time.
Humans don't live alone in the woods--not now, not 5,000 years ago (nor 45,000 years before that). They band together to modify, control, and tame their environment.
Now, you might miss your devices, pastimes, and widespread sanitation...however, from my understanding, humans don't typically worry about malevolent grues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomically_modern_human#Mode...
We're all priviledged for being literate and having access to the internet.
A more representative what-if would be to choose between trading places with a random person 5000 years ago, or with a random modern person anywhere in the world.
I would rather trade within the modern world, but it's nowhere nearly as sure a thing.
Jokes aside, but I think this idea applied like many centuries ago. I think I might read it in some philosophical text. So today you would not be able to do that obviously, since you need to purchase land etc. and the whole society is based on purchasing to satisfy your needs.
Although I would argue hunting and foraging is work, so most animals don't get out of it either.
The only problem I have this statement is if you do not believe in the notion of freewill, then yes this is accurate.
If you believe in the notion of freewill, then you would think instead of seeing what's happening and think that all the wealth is being concentrated into the top 1% of society unfairly, what's to stop you from being in that 1%?
Nearly every obstacle you will list, I can name several people who have overcome those impediments to be successful. When you stop thinking the deck is stacked against you, it frees your mind to think of what your capable of, not of the greater odds that stacked against that will prevent you from achieving what you want to.
The free will of the top 1% that don't want to have their wealth diminished by sharing it with others.
The practical impacts of poor education and healthcare leading to delayed educational and/or career opportunities.
Businesses buying politicians to diminish individual access to education, healthcare, and other opportunities.
Politicians and businesspeople working to reduce worker rights to fair wages and safe working conditions.
Politicians working to disenfranchise voters, which in turns leads to their lack of representation and further diminishing their status and reducing their chances of success in life.
> Nearly every obstacle you will list, I can name several people who have overcome those impediments to be successful.
Anecdotes, almost as useful as real data.
> When you stop thinking the deck is stacked against you, it frees your mind to think of what your capable of, not of the greater odds that stacked against that will prevent you from achieving what you want to.
This is true, and it is mentally and emotionally freeing once you're out of the mindset. It doesn't negate the fact that, for many people, the odds are still, in fact, stacked against them.
There are of course exceptions, but you are much more likely to end up in the 1% if your parents are also in that segment.
In the US I have the feeling that a lot of people support its social structure because they believe themselves to be future [mb]illionaires, aka the American dream.
In Europe where most realize that they will never end up in that spot, even with hard work, there is a much more egalitarian structure to society.
I'm not saying any of them are bad, but the notion that everyone can reach the 1% is by definition false. Only 1% of the population can be in that spot.
You can via social structures even it out though so more people can share in the generated wealth. And I think that is actually free will since the social structure is chosen unless one lives under a dictatorship or such.
[1] http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21715735-new-dat...
You wrote this like it were a rhetorical question, but let's talk about social mobility. Wikipedia[1] will tell you that it's "movement of individuals... between social strata." Surely you'll agree that "the 1%" is a prime example of a social stratum, and that becoming a member of that stratum is a clear movement.
Obstacles lie between them.
To overcome these obstacles one requires capital: economic, social and cultural.
If you start without them, you'll not go far. Physics are relentless. It may be impossible — within one lifetime — to navigate the socially constructed maze from third-generation-diabetic-of-color to business services firm partner, despite the two persons being physically proximal!
Yes, one can and must make decisions in this life, and if one has free will then by all means, enjoy the faculty, but one is not free to purchase items that aren't in store. One is not free to pull levers that aren't available.
You might ask "why do poor folk fall prey to predatory lenders? Why not invest that windfall in a CD, or a more appropriate financial vehicle?" But that question only exposes your naïveté: some folk have simply never heard of the phrase "financial vehicle". They lack the cultural capital to even see the social constructs allegedly available to them. They are literally blind to them.
Free will does not enable one to open invisible doors.
Apologies for this long-winded tirade: your rhetorical question struck me as absurdly naive. You claim you "can name several people who have overcome those impediments," but "several" is not a statistically significant number, and will not convince a rational person that the United States has high social mobility.
What's to stop one from being in that 1%? Massive, invisible, entrenched social constructs requiring immense luck or capital to navigate. And then your "free" will — certainly not free of biases, neuroses or addictions — can still fuck it up.
https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-gospel-of-consumption/
Take out wildly overpriced education, healthcare, and housing, and you can get by with barely working. 40% of Americans over 16 don't work at all, granted they may rely on government transfer payments and other services. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300000
We are an industrialized, domesticated species, whether we like it or not.
This statement is just as "profound" as saying "Did you ever consider that bee's are the only animal that has to make honey just to live on the planet?" Mind blowing!
1) Dad's side, farming I guess for Mom's side
Overall I think you are right, but it seems like a non issue in a (relatively) stagnant depopulated city.
There's no case to be made that there is any economic benefit to farming in the city. By all measures, it's much more expensive.
The same can be said of other places I'd have thought?
I think that is a bit myopic.
A small farm can look nice too. And even with electric transport, there's the fact that cities have to bulldoze over miles and miles of nature in order to accommodate the kind of transport you're talking about, mainly cars. Which is why some cities are moving away from cars and into more dense kinds of environments. Once that's done, transporting your crop of the day from the farm into the city becomes a bit of a hassle
And then there is the quality aspect. Mass-produced food in the US does not taste good. The varieties you can buy in the store are optimized for 3 things: high yield, long shelf life / tolerance to travel & warehousing and appearance. When you grow your own food, you can optimize for taste. You can have a tomato that is actually sweet, not something that tastes like a cucumber. You can grow varieties that won't do well in transit (ie. fragile or easily bruised) because you're handling the vegetable from the garden to the kitchen.
Most of the time, it is impossible to even buy produce with high quality characteristics. When it is, it is often very expensive. This increases the value proposition of a personal/urban garden.
There are many things we do in our worldwide agriculture system precisely because they make economic sense. That doesn't mean they are a good idea. We are going to pay the price for that lack of judgement. I am excited to see anything that bucks that trend.
Potatoes do fine on the truck ride in from the countryside, but baby arugula, not so much. Potatoes are also a lot easier to plant and harvest by machine.
Lawns don't make any economic sense; convert them to leafy greens and fancy perennials that are not economic to grow at a scale. Deliver greens to your neighborhood via bike. They are light. Sell them to fancy restaurants for $15 a pound and not have to pay for trucking them in from 50 miles away.
Then, convert equal amount of farmland being used for green, back into wildish stuff, so birds, bees, etc have room to live and improve (pollinate) the staple crops.
Yes, they do; the fact (if this is the case) that you don't personally gain utility from them doesn't mean they don't make economic sense, neither does.the fact that they generally aren't part of the production chain for a product for sale.
(corn, wheat, soy, others)
But if it makes people happy, it might be worth it.
Not to mention that it's 'free' because of volunteers. I can also feed myself for close to free by growing my own vegetables...but it's way more efficient to just work and pay for food.
However,
Let's see if we can pick out the good here.
When you say it's a little bizarre, you're right. We are massively estranged from almost all forces that supply our life. Just as the average American has no idea how to host a website from scratch on DO, most don't know where their food comes from, how to fix their car, has no financial literacy and no civic literacy.
After years of animal husbandry, our leaders have moved toward treating the vast majority us like agricultural elements, simply repeating one small action of a larger whole for our whole lives. Projects like this can help get us out of the matrix.
As most people who try to grow food learn, it's not a one-size-fits-all activity. The art of food production has many, subtle, non-sexy details. Real world experience counts for an awful lot.
I'm not saying we must all live in tipis, playing homebuilt instruments around a fire, wearing dresses from from potato sacks, BUT living life out of debt with a strong degree of self-sufficiency and freedom from The Invisible Hand of corporate life will bring us a lot closer to our pursuit of happiness than the apparent Ponzi scheme of centralized economy.
This is wrong. The fact there are more than sufficient resources to care for every citizen does not preclude the need to pay for something.
Suppose that I self-sacrificed by under consuming and taking a risk. Instead of enjoying my free time and spending my money, I choose to spend many days building bricks. After a while, in a hut-less society, someone might ask why they need to pay for my bricks, when there are more than enough to build huts for everyone.
Raw materials may be abundant and "free", but labor, investment, and capital are not. They're they product of blood, sweat, and tears. Hardly free.
Renewable energy and automation are free once bootstrapped. Its the initial investment that requires concessions to give it away.
Given enough of both, I don't need your labor nor capital.
The overall point is good - that there's nothing that's actually free (as in beer) once all costs are accounted for.
However - Things get muddier (heh) when you consider: - The supply so vastly outstrips demand ("more than enough for everyone") that the market price would be negligible - When the "true" per-person cost of "enough bricks" is negligible; only society as a whole needs enough brick to notice the cost. - When you consider what you are not charged for as a human; in other words, what other people are giving away for free that costs them their blood, sweat, and tears. (Typically, public art and the emotional labor that goes into being a human)
Note - I am very much not saying you're wrong. I'm saying that the real world appears to get waaay more complicated than that.
For example - If the per-person price is a dime, that's negligible, but across a billion people, that's a hundred million dollars. Hardly negligible. Taxes do this now - what's the space program cost each American, on average? A dollar a year? To each person, the space program is pretty much free, but to society, it's not.
For another example - Yosemite. Yosemite is free-ish - it's not charging market rates, that's for sure - and there definitely is NOT enough Yosemite "to care for every citizen". What's going on there?
So you're spot-on that it's not ultimately free, but also missing the point, which is that if society decided it was a good idea, it (probably) could be free for each individual.
I'm gonna guess if they give a family food once, they are counted as "one family fed", and their output ranges from April (if they are growing lettuces, spinach, and peas) to October (for some squash varieties). I very highly doubt they grow and store such things like potatoes and carrots for wintertime use.
For reference, an average 1kg rabbit eats 2.6oz of greens a day, or 57lbs a year.
So it sounds like they can feed one rabbit per household for one month of the year.
- Agrihood numbers: http://www.miufi.org/america-s-first-urban-agrihood
- Rabbit numbers: http://rabbit.org/suggested-vegetables-and-fruits-for-a-rabb... http://www.cookitsimply.com/measurements/cups/lettuce-shredd...
No, the distribution problem is largely political - in fact modern famine and starvation is almost always a problem with local government, or the warlords that pass for it.
This article from The Economist gives a good overview: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21591650-walmart-carr...
Well, that and outright theft by warlords with AK47s and thugs riding around in trucks...
[1]http://www.nbcnews.com/id/44147002/ns/world_news-africa/t/so...
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The produce from our production farm (which produced over 50,000 lbs of produce since 2011 years) goes to 1 of 4 places (listed in order of priority):
Individual households using a pay-what-you-can model. Think of it as a suggested donation grocery store. (Note: we have supplied over 200 households within 2 square miles supplied in the last 2 years)
Local Markets Thousands of lbs of produce go to over 5 markets within 5 miles)
Local Restaurants & Vendors thousands of lbs of produce supply locally-owned businesses all over southeast Michigan)
Food Pantries: Local Churches
Coalition on Temporary Shelters (COTS) & Forgotten Harvest
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We thought about doing some gardening when we had a backyard in an apartment in New York, but even grass wouldn't grow in that soil - it didn't help that the soil was littered with debris like glass, concrete, random bits of metal, etc.
If you want to reduce traffic and co2 further while increasing livable, walkable space in dense urban areas - then that can be accomplished by reducing the width of the roads.
The traffic comes from the fact that every family not living in the city, but living near it, ends up commuting there anyway.
It's a really nice idea I just can't imagine it's as scalable or sustainable as the article seems to wish for.
Regardless, any time more food is grown close to where it will be eaten, this is a good thing. I just put up a new site this week focused on sustainable food systems: https://terra.farm. I'm adding content to the wiki atm, so if anyone has suggestions on stuff that might fit, lmk.