Free food!
That’s the One Big Idea of Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon, authors of The 100-Mile Diet – A Year of Local Eating, the noted 2007 book about the couple’s adventures trying to sustain themselves on food grown within the titular distance of their Vancouver apartment.
The couple says there could be a bounty within Vancouver’s cityscape and is advocating that the city aggressively grow fruit trees for anyone to harvest and mandate garden space in new condominium buildings. And that’s just the beginning of their revolutionary plan to make fresh food a routine for Vancouverites.
Is the point of this to feed hungry people or change attitudes about nature?
MacKinnon: The main point is to re-create a connection between ourselves and the natural world. Too many of us have this idea that food is something that comes from a store. This would reconnect us to the idea that food comes from a living world. It would also have the benefit of being an option if you didn’t have a lot of money. You’d be able to supplement your ordinary diet by going out and actually harvesting food in the city. Right now, a big problem for people at the lowest end of the income scale is food that’s available to them at that price is some of the worst food you could possibly eat.
Smith: The food would definitely be better quality because it would be so fresh. That’s important – for low-income people to have access to fresh food, not just the kind of canned food more typical at a food bank. A food bank has a charitable feeling not everyone feels good about if they have to use that service whereas if you’re the one taking the initiative and picking the food yourself, I think that would help restore people’s sense of self-esteem, especially if it was normalized so that everyone was doing it.
You mentioned two small experiments to test this idea – fruit trees and mandated gardens at condos. Are they the two ideas most within reach?
MacKinnon: There are all kinds of other smaller-scale ones. A friend of mine and I went on to Craigslist and asked if anybody had fruit trees they just weren’t using. We were contacted by somebody who had a plum tree. We went out and we harvested all the plums we could take. We didn’t have to pay anything. Then we canned those plums and turned them into jam. And that was all the jam we needed for two households for more than a year. That, to me, was indicative of the kind of power this has.
There’s a possibility of those sorts of things – networks that connect people who have fruit they’re not using to people who might want to use it, community canning kitchens, all of these sorts of things are possible. For me, one that’s really interesting would be looking at how do we rebuild the seashore and the bays and harbours around Vancouver to such an extent that people are able to eat from them again.
You mean so they could fish?
MacKinnon: Or harvest clams, eat oysters, eat mussels or things like that. If we look at the history of Vancouver, this city was built on what were once teeming waters and, to me, that’s the biggest this idea can go.
How would free fruit trees work in Vancouver?
MacKinnon: You would have neighbourhoods really rich in fruit in such a way that you would be able to walk down the street in various seasons and harvest the fruit you want. It would be straight, simple hunter-gatherer activity in the city. We already see that, to some extent, with blackberries. There’s a subculture in Vancouver absolutely dedicated to blackberry picking. You could see that expanding to all the other kinds of fruit available in the city if it were not only planted and available but part of the public consciousness.
