Isn’t it great to root in the earth or to strum around on a spade?
Just like Rock ‘n’ Roll, food is a way to distinguish yourself. Everything you eat, you have decided upon. Food is more than just a product to consume, it is about lifestyle, fashion, attitudes, status and politics. Similarly, farming is more than food production, it is also a lifestyle and about delivering services and goods to society.
A lack of transparency of the conventional food chain and concerns on animal welfare, public health, environmental impact results in initiatives to create an alternative to this conventional production system. As in Rock ‘n’ Roll, mainly young people and people from different racial groups, try to make a difference from the conventional system by starting their own initiatives. Guerilla gardening, box schemes, community gardens, city farms and new orchards form together a new food movement.
This new food movement tries to break boundaries and start the debate on the future of our food, and they succeed. The growing attention for food and farming is reflected in films[i], festivals[ii], books[iii], newspapers[iv], clothes[v], language[vi] but also in campaigns of NGO’s[vii]. Especially projects in urban areas are growing rapidly and vary from initiatives to grow food in parks, to have chickens on the roof, pigs in the backyard, aquaponic systems in café’s and organizing eat-ins and crop-mobs. With the new food system, people try to modify the existing system, in other words, a new revolution is starting… the revolution on food. Make sure you don’t miss the new Rock ‘n’ Roll because it sounds great!
Text: Evelien de Olde
Picture: Friends of the Earth Adelaide – Reclaim the Food Chain
[i] Food, Inc., No Impact Man, Greenhorns, The Future of Food
[iii] For example: Hungry City (Carolyn Steel) and Urban Agriculture (David Tracey)
[iv] The number of newspaper articles on local produced food and urban agriculture published in the Dutch newspapers Trouw, Volkskrant and NRC Next are increasing.
[v] Organic and gardening clothes but also T-shirts with ‘Grow your own’ or ‘Support local agriculture’
[vi] Do you know the words: polytunnel, aquaponics, hydroponics, eat-in, crop-mob?
[vii] Campaign of several organisations such as the grow campaign, good food campaign, the real food campaign and the right to food campaign.