Food for thought
by Henning Thomsen, Gehl Architects
It's hard to think of anything more central to sustainability than food. Without adequate and healthy food, no one can flourish. And yet when it comes to food, the modern world has steadily been moving away from both sustainable production as well as sustainable consumption of food.
As Carolyn Steel has phrased it in her book Hungry City: " Feeding the cities takes a gargantuan effort; one that arguably has a greater social and physical impact on our lives and planet than anything else we do. Yet few of us in the West are conscious of the process. Food arrives on our plates as if by magic, and we rarely stop to wonder how it got there."
Modern urban living has removed many of us from the necessary knowledge and appreciation of food and healthy living and this constitutes a fundamental threat to future living. But there are initiatives around the world that try to reconnect us with both a healthier and a more sustainable production and consumption of food.
Slow Food is one such initiative. It is a non-profit organization that was founded in 1989 to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people's dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world. Slow Food is based on the philosophy that the food we eat should taste good, it should be produced in a clean way that does not harm the environment, animal welfare or our health and the food producers should receive fair compensation for their work.
Also the farmer's market idea is steadily growing in many countries. Farmers' market produce is renowned for being locally-grown and very fresh. People argue farmers' markets allow farmers to pick produce at the peak of flavor, preserve the nutritional content of fresh produce, and since locally-grown produce does not travel as far to get to your table, the difference in mileage saves fossil fuels.
What is important in all the initiatives is that they require conscious choices to be made by all of us. It must become a part of your choice of lifestyle, and does not come about by itself or by popular vote. But in the development of a sustainable village, exactly this cornerstone of our lives could become ingrained in the development process and the iconography and attractiveness of a sustainable village. A village you will choose to live in because you have made a definite and distinct choice about your life.
